Distinctively Christian superstition

Paganism in its old dress had continued to fade in the sixth century along with the aristocratic traditions that sustained it, and here we can taste a distinctively Christian superstition. Dragons were always spoken of in ancient legend, but direct assertions that real dragons had been seen and dealt with begin to mark Christian texts from about the fifth century, when a pope was shown destroying a man-eating dragon that lived some-where near the temple of Vesta in the heart of Rome.14 This useful snake is his relative.

Gregory’s Dialogues are so famously full of stories that leave the world of bureaucracy and predictability behind for the realm of charming or terrifying fancy that one recent scholar has mounted a vehement attack on their authenticity.15 The wise and spiritual Gregory could not, he argues, have written these fairy tales. This is not the place for that argument, which has not proved widely persuasive, but suffice it to say that the stories contain a language operating by its own laws, and they offer a persuasive portrait of a world that runs beyond the documentary and the sane. The world of Gregory’s Dialogues is one in which holy monks and bishops offer the interpretive key to understanding and surmounting a chaotic landscape and society. In the Greek church, contemporaries were writing “lives of the fathers” in a similar spirit during the same decades, and the combined impact is to make us realize that these books marked the end of an age of famous and influential monastic leaders. Henceforth, stories about these men would dominate the conversation surrounding monastic holiness, and real monks would take second place in a world of routinized charisma.

Benedict of Nursia

The second of the four books into which the Dialogues are divided had its own special impact, for it tells the story of Benedict of Nursia, a monk and abbot who had died fifty years earlier at his community’s house at Monte Cassino, south of Rome. Gregory could never have met or seen the man, and by his day the community had been sacked and destroyed by Lombards of the Benevento duchy, no great thing considering how small and poorly housed monastic communities then were. Monte Cassino was restored, if that is the right word, early in the eighth century by a refounder who knew of the place and its fame from reading Gregory. (It was sacked and rebuilt again in the ninth and twentieth centuries.)

The structured series of stories that Gregory tells of Benedict and his equally pious and monastic sister Scholastica had the effect of providing the backstory that would accompany the monastic rule attributed to Benedict through the middle ages, after the Rule became a standard in Charlemagne’s realms. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in 800, and Charlemagne was generous in his support of popes and papal ideas thereafter. So when his bureaucrats of God selected Benedict’s rule as the best and began to promote it throughout western Europe, the availability of a suitably edifying biography from the pen of the best and most spiritual of popes had the effect of cementing his authority. (Britain lay outside Charlemagne’s power, but Gregory’s prestige there had another source: his influence in sending out Augustine of Canterbury to organize the churches in Britain, leading to wide acceptance of the Benedictine model there as well.)